Celebrating a Decade of the Believer

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The crowd at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn, where the Believer celebrated its 10th anniversary.
Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

By

David Shapiro

March 26, 2013 9:31 p.m. ET

"I'm going to read about half of a 20-page science-fiction poem about different eras, unhinged nostalgia and the ways that capitalism impacts our relationships to our bodies and to each other," said Joanna Fuhrman, sitting in a chair in the back of Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene on Monday evening.

Ms. Fuhrman, a poet and professor of poetry at Rutgers University, was one of three writers reading at the Greenlight to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Believer, the San Francisco-based literary magazine published by McSweeney's, and a new book of interviews published by the magazine.

A sign outside the store promised "mingling to follow," and, indeed, the primarily 20- and 30-something crowd of Brooklyn literary types mingled with Believer editors. Guests sipped beer provided by Brooklyn Brewery and nibbled exotic treats donated by Spirited Brooklyn. Dustin Kurtz, marketing manager at independent publisher Melville House, walked up to the treats and said, "Wow!" to himself, before grabbing a small cup of spiced bacon beer nuts and a beer-infused mal-o'more.

ENLARGE

Katie Wudel
Cassandra Giraldo for The Wall Street Journal

One of the magazine's editors, Andrew Leland, introduced the reading with a nod to a potential calendar conflict: "The Believer is an Orthodox Jewish magazine, so thank you all for making it here on the first night of Passover!" he joked. (The Believer is religiously unaffiliated.)

"The Believer's staff is all over the country, and we communicate primarily via email, so events like this are great because you get to spend time with the community around the magazine and really see email come alive," said Mr. Leland, while mingling.

Poet Alan Gilbert brought up another potential calendar conflict, interrupting himself during his own poem to ask the crowd about the relationship between the phrase "midnight madness," used in his poem, and the nickname of the NCAA basketball tournament, March Madness. He was met with silence, which prompted him to look around the room and observe, "This isn't a sports-oriented crowd…"

The evening's star was author and University of Pittsburgh professor Gary Lutz, whose live interview with Believer editor Ross Simonini had the otherwise reserved listeners in stitches. Mr. Lutz expounded on his lifelong aversion to oral contact (and, later, on his fondness for divorce).

"I didn't have my first conversation until I was in graduate school," said Mr. Lutz, whose self-consciousness and half-joking self-deprecation made Woody Allen seem like Albert Brooks. "I was a late bloomer."

"When I'm writing, I can spend hours on a single sentence," he continued. "But in person, people tend to think of me as mute, or mentally deficient, or someone to be avoided as a person who does not have much to contribute to a conversation. People don't like hourlong pauses between thoughts," Mr. Lutz mused earnestly, avoiding eye contact.

Ross Simonini, who interviewed Mr. Lutz at the event, had conducted an email interview with Mr. Lutz throughout the summer of 2006 but had only met him in person five minutes before their interview. "He was exactly what I expected him to be in person, based on our emails and secondhand encounters through friends," said Mr. Simonini, smiling and refusing to elaborate.

In the back of the bookstore prior to his interview, Mr. Lutz discussed some recent and disappointing trends in punctuation and grammar, a subject about which he is writing a book.

"A lot of publications would publish a sentence like this: 'The suspect was arrested at his apartment in Prospect Heights.' But without a comma after 'apartment,' the sentence signifies that the suspect has at least two apartments. Conversely, for example, you might read a sentence like this: 'Malcolm Gladwell's book, 'The Tipping Point,' introduced a term that is now in wide currency.' A reader unfamiliar with Gladwell would assume that he had published only one book!

"These errors appear with frequency in the Goings On About Town section of the New Yorker. They also happen a lot in music writing," he went on. "The sentence 'Radiohead is touring to promote their new album' contains a logical and grammatical breakdown regarding whether the band is singular or plural. The phrase 'The band's 1993 debut album' is also confusing to the careful reader, because a band could not have had a 1993 debut album, and also, for example, a 1994 debut album."

"I understand that writers are trying to fit many ideas into short sentences, but these breakdowns are very distracting," he added, shifting in his chair with frustration.

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